On 04/23/2011 09:58 PM, Russ Allbery wrote:
Karl Williamson<pub...@khwilliamson.com> writes:
It's worse than I thought. I ran some experiments. It appears that the
various formatters don't recognize 'text', and so there's no way to
specify a fall back. Perhaps there is a 'text' formatter. I don't know
what it would be.
pod2text (Pod::Text).
There have been many proposals over the years for a table representation
in POD, but the general consensus has always been that tables are
inherently complex enough that the result would be straying away from the
"plain" in Plain Old Documentation. Table markup in wikis is probably
about as simple as one can get away with and still generate a useful
table, and it's still pretty complex. Tables are inherently hard to do
properly, and there's an immediate demand for additional features (row
spanning, column spanning, headings, etc.).
I don't object to supporting it in Pod::Text and Pod::Man, but I'd have to
ask someone else to write the initial implementation. I think support in
Pod::Man at least would be fairly important before deciding to add tables
to Perl's core documentation, but the research on how to use tbl properly
is more than I currently have time for.
I used to be considered a [nt]roff guru. I would still rather use it
than MS Word, but I find the Linux implementations lacking, and actually
don't have much need to write documents. Anyway, I could easily write
the Pod::Man part (famous last words); but I don't know how widespread
tbl is, or its quality on Linux. I imagine the nroff output of tbl
could be used for Pod::Text, again spoken with no investigation.
